turned to Mitch. She smiled just a little more, her eyes crinkling around the edges, and Mitch felt a surprising jolt of awareness. “That would make you a really good Samaritan, Mr. Sterling. But I’ve got enough gas to make it two more miles—I hope,” she added under her breath.
“I can ride into town with you if you’d like,” Mitch heard himself offer.
The wariness came back into her big eyes. “No thank you.”
Mitch felt like an idiot. Where she came from, women did not accept rides with strange men. They didn’t much around Riverbend, either, come to think of it. But he’d been brought up to offer his assistance to people in distress. “No problem,” he said to fill the awkward silence that followed her words.
“The first gas station is just three blocks inside the town limits,” Ethan told her. “You follow us and we’ll have you there in no time.”
“Thank you.” She got into her car and fastened the seat belt over her distended middle. “I’m ready when you are.”
Ethan nodded, tipped the bill of his hat and walked back to the cruiser, Mitch behind him.
“She’s pretty far along to be making a cross-country jaunt,” Mitch said as they passed the little red compact and its occupant. Mitch watched in the side mirror as she followed them onto the road.
“Yeah, she is pretty big,” Ethan agreed. He picked up the receiver of his radio and pushed the toggle switch. “We’ll just run a routine search on her license plate and ID.”
“Jeez, Ethan. You don’t trust anyone, do you?”
“Nope. Ain’t that why you hired me?” Ethan retorted with a grin.
Mitch shook his head and settled back in his seat for the rest of the trip into town. Ethan was a damned good cop. And good cops were suspicious cops. Yet anyone with half a brain and one good eye could tell that the woman in the car behind them wasn’t a threat to anyone.
Except maybe a man’s heart, with those big blue eyes and that lost-little-girl smile.
Mitch caught himself looking in the side mirror again, wondering what she’d look like if she smiled fully and without restraint. She’d be a real beauty.
Where the hell had that thought come from? He hadn’t had the energy or inclination to look at another woman in a long, long time. He sure wasn’t about to start now. She was a perfect stranger. She was pregnant. She was just passing through. In an hour she’d be gone from his life.
He leaned his head against the back of the seat and watched the clock tower on the Sycamore County Courthouse come into view, then the water tower and the elevator rising above the trees and the flat Indiana farmland he loved. The three tallest points in Riverbend.
This was the place where his roots went deep into the dark fertile soil. This was home. But his mind wasn’t interested in the familiar view. It was still focused on the pregnant woman in the red compact.
He turned his head enough to bring Ethan’s profile into view. “What did you say her name was again?”
CHAPTER TWO
TESSA LEANED BACK in the wooden glider located in the center of the little park and set it swinging with a push of her feet. She looked out over the Sycamore River to the far shore. It wasn’t that far away, maybe a few hundred yards? She’d never been a very good judge of distance. The water was a mixture of shades, blue and green and brown, deep and slow-moving. It seemed tamer, more sedate, than its famous neighbor, the Wabash, of which she’d caught glimpses from the car.
A rowboat with a small outboard motor putt-putted its way to a landing across the river where houses lined the bank. Some were older and looked as if they could use a little loving care. Some were new, a few large and substantial, with landscaped lawns and big wooden docks jutting out into the river. But beyond the manicured lawns the land was claimed by cornfields. Two-story white farmhouses and red-and-white barns stood in tree-filled yards as big as city parks. Cylindrical blue silos dotted the cloudy sky above pastures of black-and-white cows. For a moment Tessa wondered if she’d landed in her own private version of Oz. The town behind her looked like a Norman Rockwell painting. A town of her dreams.
She settled back in the swing and kept it going with a gentle push now and then. As she watched the reflections of clouds and trees in the water, she felt her eyes grow heavy. She wished she could stay here for the night. Catch up on her sleep, get her hair and her clothes really clean. It would be heaven. Certainly this little town, with the river at its feet and the late-afternoon sun and the scent of a few fading roses in a nearby flower bed, seemed about as close as you could get.
Her quiet reverie was broken by the sound of a car pulling into the parking lot behind her swing. She didn’t turn around to see who it was. She didn’t know a soul in Riverbend.
No one but the cop who’d eyed her so suspiciously and then escorted her into town. And the man who’d been riding with him. The one with eyes the same rich brown as the plowed earth and a smile that lifted the left corner of his mouth a littler higher than the right. Mitch Sterling, the cop had said his name was. She wondered if he had anything to do with the big hardware and lumberyard she’d passed on her way down to the river. It had looked like a going concern. Not as big as the Home-Mart she’d worked for in Albany, but impressive for an independent in this age of mega-chain stores.
“Hi there. Remember me?”
She turned her head to find the man she’d been thinking about smiling down at her. His voice was low-pitched and a little rough around the edges, but as warm as his smile.
She didn’t smile back, although she was tempted. You didn’t smile at strange men in California. Or in New York, for that matter.
“Are you enjoying the view?”
“Yes,” she said. This time she did smile. She wasn’t in L.A. anymore. She was in God’s country. Or so one or two signs she’d seen along the roadside had proclaimed. “It’s very peaceful here.”
“It’s one of my favorite views.”
“You come here often?”
He propped one foot on the rose bed’s border, which was made of railroad ties stacked three deep. Real railroad ties, she’d noticed. Not those anemic landscape ties they’d sold at Home-Mart. This rose bed was going to be here for a long, long time. That was the way you built things in a place you never intended to leave.
“Most everyone in town does. But it’s the same view I get from my kitchen window.” He pointed down the way to a wide stream that emptied into the river. “I live in the yellow house over there.”
Tessa turned to follow his pointing finger, but she already knew what she would see. The house wasn’t yellow. It was cream-colored. Craftsman-styled, foursquare and solid with a stone foundation and big square porch posts. Roses grew on trellises on either side of the wide front steps. Pink roses, with several still blooming, like those in the park.
She loved history. Not so long ago it had been her intention to share that love of history by teaching. Not ancient history, or Colonial history. Not even Civil War history. But the history of the century just past. The enthusiasm and hubris of the early decades.
